decentralized sole sourcing at Holy Roar Records

It boils down to Artists and Labels having too much choice over where to put their music and where to call home on the web; so how about having your own site, and you can host it all over there yourself. It’s really not that hard nowadays! Let’s call it Digital DIY.

The essence of Digital DIY is that you not wrap your home on the web inside that of another. You create your very own destination. Somewhere personal. Somewhere unique. Where you live, where you store things, and hopefully where both your fans and other 3rd parties can come to find more about what you’re up to.

Can’t they use iTunes, can’t they use 7digital? can’t they use both of these and much much more? Well sure they can, and they do. Their distribution channels already push to many services such as these. But isn’t this enough? No, I don’t think it is. Why do they even have their own domain and their own website at all? Aren’t they happy putting up with only having a MySpace page, a Last.fm page, a PureVolume page, a Facebook page, a Twitter profile, and a blog on Blogger? No, I guess not. What it seems like they were looking for is a place they can call their own.

And Steve’s solution is going to be open source.

Anyhow, so, the idea is to have each person or label host their own music and then have software hook up all these different sources into a single integrated experience at the point of delivery on a third party site. Alice and Bob host their own sites with their own music, Carol invokes both of them in her site without having to rehost the MP3s. The jargon I made up for this in the “solutions” slide of my web of songs talk was “Decentralized sole sourcing”.

BTW, the “On Probation by Youves” track there is lots of fun. If Steve’s library was up and running already I’d use it to embed the track here. :-)

An inversion has been taking place with sites like FaceBook and Twitter and the sites that reference them, perhaps inspired by the relative success of Disqus and Friendfeed – for instance, I have been using my gmail id more for authentication purposes than to check my email for a while, but the same is becoming true for FaceBook Connect, and particularly Twitter.

This goes beyond using a third party Twitter client – more and more I go through sites that authenticate me using my Twitter credentials, then feed my content back into that stream, but are not FriendFeed – these are branded sites. Twitter has become a point of authentication, and to a lesser extent, so has FaceBook. This should allow brands, artists and organisations to leverage these streams without relying or tying down with them.

In a similar vein to the notion that bands and brands just want a place to call their own, I recently wrote about an idea for commercial and non-commercial branding that involves separating the concerns of content from the concerns of brand. The idea is still pretty nascent, but basically boils down to this: online branding needs to evolve into a secure namespace for identity. [ http://is.gd/5OAkJ ]

Not sure exactly where this idea is going, but I feel it is important, and I’d of course appreciate any comments. Cheers :)

This is just some playing about / good intentions at the moment, we’ll see how it goes. There’s a big barrier for entry for a lot of artists and labels that obviously don’t want their music being streamed around (they would be able to track it themselves!), and also because it would use up their bandwidth. But those (and others) are issues that can be overcome/solved imo by evolving the idea to suit.